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Berny Belvedere Profile picture
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28 Jul, 5 tweets, 2 min read
I think this is pretty obviously an overstatement, yet I also think it’s hysterically extra to talk of Simone Biles’s “radical courage”—so I don’t know where that places me on the Takes Spectrum.
I think @foster_type and @jbarro are right, and it’s worth asking why things are this way now. Yang has offered a theory, a totalizing story about wholescale wokist upheaval. I think the answer is more prosaic.
I think—and this is as Girardian as I get—the awareness we all have that we exist in a culture war arena precipitates over the top defenses of things we like. We know Charlie Kirk will be out there shitting all over Biles, so our pushback has to take an equally forceful form.
The New Yorker is working within an environment of expected culture war conflict. As is the Federalist. This sort of ecosystem nudges its participants toward hyperbolic, flag-planting writing. A “what she did was ok” take feels like it doesn’t belong here, like it’s not welcome.
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More from @bernybelvedere

Berny Belvedere Profile picture
26 Jul
Ben Shapiro is right that this gesture is simple and easy. It's also empty—depolarization isn't achieved by being a raging hyperpartisan bomb-thrower for 364 days of the year while pantomiming a commitment to ending partisan rancor by listing some names across a few tweets.
You want to help us depolarize? You want to mitigate the partisan animus that is swallowing up every social issue into a culture war maelstrom from which it feels like there's no escape?

Recommending Steven Pinker isn't going to help with that. Reimagining your publication can.
As I put it in a prior piece: Ben is the embodiment of an infinitely toxic style of commentary responsible for all manner of point-scoring mindlessness. Which means that, for him, depolarization represents an existential threat—it represents annihilation.

medium.com/arc-digital/be…
Read 5 tweets
Berny Belvedere Profile picture
25 Jul
You just have to appreciate how comfortable James Lindsay has become with who he is, and who his audience is. In the past he would have denied finding black women funny-looking, but he's leaning into it now.
"Actually, people agree with me, which shows you that my post is accurate. But if somehow they stop agreeing with me, it's because my post is accurate and it struck a nerve."
Blocking so many people thanks to this wonderful quote tweet. So, so many.
Read 6 tweets
Berny Belvedere Profile picture
19 Jul
I think Ben Shapiro is one of the most destructive forces in media today: getting filthy rich from creating a sprawling hothouse of brainless ownlibs outrage and then selling admission to marks who get duped by it.

npr.org/2021/07/19/101…
sToP cEnSoRiNG c0nsErVaTiVEs!!
More on Daily Wire Conservatism here:
Read 5 tweets
Berny Belvedere Profile picture
17 Jul
I don’t buy this. Mainly because you could take away all the mistakes the “credentialed” elites have made, just imagine they never happened, and it’s just outlandish to believe that the “Covid kookery” we’ve currently got would be less rampant in such a scenario.
Notice what I’m saying: there certainly were major missteps by elites—but they weren’t causal drivers of the right-wing kookery, nor do they justify its presence in any way.
It’s a good question. I think elite mismanagement is sometimes—like in the case of Covid—epiphenomenal to right-wing distrust. I think the elite worldview itself—mistakes or no—ensured it would be opposed by an ascendant right-wing populism. The mistakes didn’t change anything.
Read 4 tweets
Berny Belvedere Profile picture
14 Jul
As someone who has sometimes criticized anti-woke critics for appearing incapable of sizing up the "threat of wokeism" in a measured and proportionate way, I agree with Yang that the "worst excesses" response too often serves to deflect away from legitimate concerns.
Yglesias suggests a focus on "the worst excesses" of the "identity politics left" is not as fruitful as a focus on social policy and its effects. And Yang's response is to recast his focus as really important: as "attending closely to the takeover of public institutions."
Interestingly, a little over a week ago Yang had an Yglesias-like moment ("THAT'S not important, THIS is important") when he downplayed the value of focusing on the Claire Lehmann/Bret Weinstein dispute over Covid and vaccines.
Read 4 tweets
Berny Belvedere Profile picture
14 Jul
Can you appreciate how incredible it is that in this universe—right here on planet earth, in fact—a human being exists who actually thinks the United States of America is currently in the grip of a Marxist regime?
R E K T
Had to finesse her for getting my name wrong.
Read 5 tweets

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